


The Strangers

by RomanMoray



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Could be read as Boba/Cobb, Gen, I didn't proofread this at all, One-Shot, Post Season 2, Season 2 spoilers, i'm not even sure what to tag this as, this is mostly talking and spotchka, very vague references to mand'alor din djarin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28616262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RomanMoray/pseuds/RomanMoray
Summary: Power changes hands on Tatooine practically overnight. Rumors of the coup make their way across the ever-shifting sands of the Northern Dune Sea, all the way to the isolated town of Mos Pelgo and its Marshal.Much sooner than he expected to, Cobb Vanth sees his old armor again—and gets a peek into various galactic dramas that fortunately have nothing to do with him.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 130





	The Strangers

**Author's Note:**

> This is not even remotely related to any of my other projects, but I simply could not evict this interaction from my head. I'm not sure if Boba would know exactly what had happened to his armor at this point canonically, but for the purposes of this story, he does not. Enjoy!

The news that Jabba's palace—it was still called that, despite the Hutt being long dead—had been purged of Bib Fortuna's crew and was now under new management came slowly to Mos Pelgo. Normally, they didn't get much information regarding the rising and falling of Tatooine's crime lords at all, out in the middle of nowhere with barely any traffic through town and nothing worth anything for the cartels to exploit, but apparently this most recent usurper had caused quite a stir.

It was first put on Marshal Cobb Vanth's radar by a kid coming home from visiting a relative in Anchorhead. He'd pulled up to the cantina on his speeder, buzzing with excitement, telling anyone who'd lend him an ear that he'd seen blasterfire at the old palace when he'd passed it on his way home.

That on its own wasn't unusual, but the heads of Fortuna's top lieutenants on stakes outside the place was certainly a new choice in decor.

Cobb had spared it a moment's thought, but only a moment—he'd had a meeting with the Tusken Chieftain that he'd had to get to, and he wanted to make sure he brushed up on his signing before he went. The trust between their communities was tenuous, but Cobb would stick his own head on a spike if he was the one who shattered the peace after all that work.

A week later, a pretty young Twi'lek woman in the typical garb of a palace slave had stumbled out of the desert, water canteen empty, hungry and sunburnt. They'd put her up in an empty house, and when she was well enough to speak she told them that the new occupants of Jabba's palace had freed her, as well as all the other palace slaves.

She also said that the new lord was, roughly translated, "a green iron warrior." Cobb, whose Ryl was rusty at best, hadn't known what to make of that at the time.

So, they didn't condone slavery—that was a nice change—but they _did_ condone putting heads on stakes. Cobb couldn't blame them, but it did make the newcomers hard to decipher, especially when he got wind a few days later that the new lord was going from town to town, in person, burning out the remains of Fortuna's loyalists and gathering followers in the process.

He also heard things like the new lord was "made of weapons" and "had come back from the dead," and that he had a partner who "could see a massiff's tooth in the sand from fifteen miles away." Like he said—hard to decipher.

Mos Pelgo had obscurity on its side, as well as the fact that it didn't officially exist any more, and therefore did not appear on any map generated after the Empire fell. Word of mouth was the only way to learn the town's location, and good luck finding your way there through the Dune Sea without freezing or roasting. Tatooine might be rough all over, but the North got the worst of it—the storms, the extreme temperatures, the lack of—well— _anything_ to live off of easily.

Eventually, though, the strangers did find them, as Cobb had suspected they might.

He was in the cantina when they arrived. The Marshal spent most of his time in the cantina, seeing as it was also the town hall, the courthouse, the reception hall, the main setting for business meetings, and so on. Done with his duties for the day, Cobb was sitting at the bar with his spotchka when a thin shadow passed through the door. He looked up to find himself at the wrong end of a sniper rifle held by a formidable, dark-haired woman in an angular black and red jacket.

Cobb didn't have time to process any of that before another, bulkier shadow took up threshold, and Cobb had to stop his jaw from dropping open like a dead womp rat.

The figure was backlit from the outside, but Cobb would know that armor anywhere. He'd worn it for years—it had been his protection, his freedom, and his redemption. He hadn't ever expected to see it again, after handing it off to Mando, but there it was, back in Mos Pelgo after only...what had it been? Not even half a standard year.

Once his eyes had adjusted to the light, he noticed the changes. It'd been painted, restored to its original bluish green and blood red, and some of the dents had been worked out, with the notable exception of the little crater in the helmet. Cobb felt like he was seeing something truly special, a relic rehabilitated to its former glory, and felt a pang of guilt for not making more of an effort to fix up the armor himself.

Cobb was so taken in by the armor's reappearance, like an old friend visiting, that didn't occur to him someone else had to be wearing it, seeing as armor couldn't walk on its own and all.

"You the Marshal?" The voice rumbled from inside the helmet. Cobb put on his most charming smile and tried to ignore how this man filled out the armor more than Cobb ever did, how there was power coiled in every inch of the stranger's body. And if this new Mandalorian was anything like the previous one, he was even more deadly than he looked.

"Cobb Vanth. What can I do ya for?"

"My understanding," the stranger said as he entered, pausing to place a hand on the barrel of his partner's rifle, lowering it slightly. "Was that this town was nothing but sand and bones."

Cobb straightened, defiant. "Well, it ain't, and I aim to keep it that way. We don't want any trouble out here."

Unexpectedly, the man chuckled, and Cobb's stomach did a weird flip-flop, not unlike it used to when he heard the tremors that preceded the krayt dragon passing through town.

"And I'm not looking for any," the stranger replied. "Unless even more of my information is incorrect, and the Mining Guild is still operating here, in which case I will have to kill them." He said it casually, as though he was suggesting that he had to replace a bad spark plug in a speeder.

"The Guild's long gone. No killin' necessary," Cobb confirms.

"Then this is a courtesy call, one neighbor to another. You will not interfere with my business, and no one will bother your town. You have my word." His tone was firm, but not cold. It seemed like a pretty straightforward arrangement, and possibly to Mos Pelgo's benefit; it didn't sound like there was much of a negotiation to be had, anyway.

Cobb nodded and held out his hand, and the stranger strode forward to shake it. His partner remained by the door, attentive but distant. The stranger's grip was strong, and Cobb matched it.

"I'd offer you a drink, but..." Cobb gestured at the helmet. He'd asked a Mandalorian to drink with him before, and almost gotten himself shot for his trouble.

"But what?" The stranger cocked his head to the side.

"The helmet?" He said, his words coming out like a question.

The stranger reached up and, to Cobb's surprise, removed the helmet.

The stranger was—striking, to say the least. His face was covered in a network of pale, vicious scars, some of which looked like acid burns, others more like cracks in sandstone. He appeared older than Cobb had imagined Mando to be, though of course he only had the other's voice to go on, and facial scars did tend to age a man.

His gaze was dark and severe, and Cobb knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was a man who's seen some heavy shit. 

The helmet thumped down heavily on the bar beside Cobb, and the stranger sat, then reached out to hook Cobb's jug of spotchka with a thick finger and chugged a third of the vibrant blue liquid in one go. Cobb stared.

The stranger put the jug down and pushed it back to Cobb, who refilled his (suddenly rather dainty looking) glass on autopilot.

"It's not like the thing's welded to my head." Cobb shook his own head to clear it.

"Sorry, I meant no offense—it's just, the last one of you that came through here told me that Mandos didn't take off your helmets for nothing."

The stern eyes fixed back on Cobb, sharp, calculating. "You been talking to Djarin, by any chance?"

"Who?" Cobb asked, his brain momentarily unable to connect the unfamiliar name with the only obvious link between himself and the stranger in front of him.

"Quiet, intense, armor with enough pure beskar to buy a decent-sized planet?" Cobb thought it was a bit rich, this guy calling Mando intense. Even if it was true. Which it absolutely was. "With a little green kid?"

"That's the one," he said, taking a sip from his glass.

"Not that it's my business, but by Mandalorian standards, Djarin is a cultist." Cobb nearly spat out his spotchka and had to swallow hard to to recover. The stranger leveled another _look_ at him.

"So the helmet thing is—not normal?"

"No." _Huh._ More than one Way after all, then. It didn't change Cobb's high opinion of Mando, not in the slightest—if anything, his dedication was even more admirable, if it would really be that easy to keep his Creed and save himself the inconvenience of hiding his face all the time. Those Mandalorians were an odd bunch, though, that was for damn sure.

Cobb was so lost in contemplation that he doesn't notice the stranger squinting at him thoughtfully until the man spoke up.

"What was he doing out here, anyway?"

"Thought that it wasn't your business," Cobb quipped before he could stop himself, but the stranger shrugged a broad shoulder.

"Just curious."

"He helped us kill a krayt dragon," Cobb said, and the stranger's brow rose. "Well, I say helped. He did all the killin'."

"Huh." There was a loaded pause, and Cobb knew what was coming. "He came all the way out here to do that?"

"Well, no. He was looking for another Mandalorian." The scarred face scrunched up with suspicion.

"There are no other Mandalorians on Tatooine," he said with the absolute certainty of someone who was used to knowing things.

"No," Cobb replied slowly, not sure he should admit to any involvement in this. "But I used to wear that armor you've got. When he found out it wasn't mine, and that I wasn't a Mandalorian, he threatened to kill me and take it off my corpse. Instead, we made a deal."

The expression on the other man's face became utterly unreadable, and Cobb found himself unable to stop his own nervous chatter.

"I bought it off Jawas, years ago, after the Mining Guild took over Mos Pelgo. I recognized it, from the stories, and I knew it could help my town. I used it to drive the Guild out, and then to protect the people here from raiders. I took care of it as best I could, but it ain't like there's a guidebook out there for Mando armor care. But I promise, none of that damage it had was from me," Cobb says, raising his hands defensively. "It was like that when I got it, I swear. It looked like...like..."

"...Like it had been in a Sarlacc pit for sixteen months?" The stranger supplied.

"Oddly specific," Cobb said. "But yeah." The stranger snorted and looked away. Cobb took a long draft of spotchka, just to have something to do with his face and hands.

"How is he?" Cobb asked, when the silence became uncomfortable. For some reason, the question was funny—the stranger gave a short but genuine laugh, more like a bark than anything else. Cobb even saw his stoic partner grin broadly out of the corner of his eye before she schooled her features back to neutral.

"Djarin's alright, last I checked. Rather...busy." _Well, then._ "Politically speaking," the stranger added as he took a sip of spotchka, seemingly more to himself than anyone in the room.

"What about the kid?" An odd look crossed over the stranger's face, and Cobb felt a throb of dread. If anything has happened to the kid, Mando would undoubtedly be distraught. Their bond had been something to behold, and Cobb had always felt strangely honored that, in the face of the possibility of his death, the Mandalorian had trusted that Cobb would care for his son.

Cobb would have, he knew. Of course he would have.

"Jedi took the kid."

"Wh— _Jedi?_ " Cobb didn't bother to conceal his shock. The stranger looked vaguely peeved.

"Yup."

"At least—well, at least he'll be safe. The kid's a Jedi? Really? I had no idea." Cobb shook his head in disbelief. It was no wonder Mando had been so anxious to move along after his business in Mos Pelgo was done. Even with the Empire gone, the galaxy wasn't a safe place for a baby Jedi.

"I'll tell the princess you asked about his kid. He'll like that."

"Princess?" Cobb asked—surely there _must_ be a story there—but the stranger didn't explain himself. Instead, he stood abruptly.

"We need to get moving," he said, more to his partner than Cobb, but Cobb got up anyway. It was only then that he noticed the stranger was shorter than him, and for some reason that was inconceivable.

"Well, it was nice meetin' you, mister..." Cobb trailed off expectantly.

"Boba Fett," the stranger replied. _Fett._ It was a strong name, and it suited him. "And that's Fennec." Fett jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at his partner. Fennec nodded at Cobb. "Until next time, Marshal."

"Until next time," Cobb confirmed, watching as the pair of no-longer-strangers as they left the cantina, and then Mos Pelgo, heading South.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Feel free to come yell at me on tumblr.


End file.
